The Ritual of New Creation (10 page)

Read The Ritual of New Creation Online

Authors: Norman Finkelstein

Tags: #History, #Jewish, #Religion, #General, #test

 
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to belong: the Shelley of the
Defense of Poetry,
Pater, Wilde, and of course, Emerson, in all of whose work the language of poetry and the language of criticism can rarely if ever be distinguished.
Bloom goes to some lengths to demonstrate this essential indistinguishability, loftily dismissing normative criticism's emphasis on accurate reading with Wildean wit, and repeatedly citing Emerson to justify their shared belief that "criticism is an art when it does not stop at the words of the poets, but looks at the order of his thoughts and the essential quality of his mind. Then the critic is poet."
22
This statement is similar to Emerson's more famous declaration in
The Poet
that "it is not meters, but a meter-making argument that makes a poem."
23
I cannot argue in the present context how misleading Emerson's remarks of this sort really are, but for now we may note how surprisingly little "wrestling" goes on when Bloom makes use of them. The result is less a misprision than an unquestioning acceptance of the concept, less a deceptively humbling
kenosis
than a prolongation of the precursor's original error. Critics may speak the language of poetry, and in doing so may create a discourse that is insightful, shapely, even, as Bloom would have it, "outrageous.'' But while it is certainly crucial to study the order of a poet's thoughts, their meter-making arguments, to neglect or even reject the mediating formalisms that make poetry
poetry
not philosophy, theology, psychology, rhetoric, or any hybrid thereofis to weaken critics immeasurably, and certainly not to transform them into poets. Emerson compensates for his weak poetry by becoming a wonderfully persuasive master of prose, and at its best Bloom's prose can also rise to the heights. But the insights Bloom provides into the "psychokabbalism" of influence in no way cancel that pragmatic dictum of Ezra Pound, a poet who Bloom frequently enjoys dismissing: "Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work."
Suppose we accept momentarily Bloom's assertion that literary criticism is prose poetry (or that poetry is verse criticism), despite the generic confusion that will result. As I have implied, Bloom is an extremely uneven writer, regardless of how the texts which he produces end up being classified. Large expanses of his prose sound like rough drafts. He proposes searching questions which prove to be rhetorical, as he frequently fails to provide direct answers. He can be obsessively repetitive, yet at the same time appear bewilderingly digressive. The density of quotation, allusion, and simple name-dropping with which the reader constantly must contend can be maddening, regardless if it is approbation or censure which Bloom attaches to
 
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each particular citation. And all these leaping figures, these wandering devices, are paraded before us with complete insouciance and utter self-consciousness under the rubric of "wildness" or "extravagance."
These and other similar qualities in Bloom's writing have not escaped notice before. Jean-Pierre Mileur claims that Bloom postpones the inevitable reduction and absorption of his ideas, their domestication into the institutionalized critical tradition, by the dizzying speed and virtuosity of his publication, which gives him a flexibility and capacity for constant self-revision approximating that of orality:
The frequently heard criticism that Bloom publishes too much too quickly and that his statements are imperfectly consistent with one another clearly amounts to an accusation that he is violating the proper imbalance between the authority of the tradition and the imaginative desire of the individual writer, which the limits of a written tradition and the further difficulties of the institution of publication are intended to enforce.
24
This almost sounds like a defense of Bloom devised by Derrida and executed by Foucault, and as appealing as
that
fantasy may sound, it remains a fantasy. What Mileur says about publication as an enforcement of institutional standards may apply to a younger, unknown critic, but not to Bloom, whose audience by now is firmly entrenched. In the main, it is an academic audience, which will read his publications whether it relishes or castigates the virtuosity of his style. What Mileur calls the "truly terrifying prospect" of "giving up an assured institutional audience and attempting to form a new one"
25
simply is not a prospect which Bloom will have to facethough he himself probably regards it as rather attractive and not very terrifying at all. Unless at some later date literary theory truly does become the negative theology to which Bloom compares it,
26
he will have to remain, unlike Emerson, not a prophet but a professor of prophecy.
The Agon of Humanism
reject your parents vehemently enough, and you will become a belated version of them, but compound with their reality, and you may partly free yourself.
27
 
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But these days, even professors of prophecy have their uses. The unwieldy but willful qualities of Bloom's prose and the generically blurred but urgently voiced argumentation of his project are, both Bloom and his commentators know, agonistically related to the crisis of humanism conveniently represented by postwar modes of Continental thought. With its panoply of sources ancient and modern, Bloom's theory is both a symptom of and a response to this crisis; his Americanized Gnosis, pragmatic and self-reliant, is formulated at least in part as a rejoinder to "all Gallic modes of recent interpretation because they dehumanize poetry and criticism."
28
And while a comprehensive discussion of this crisis, broadly involving questions of the efficacy of scientific knowledge, of the autonomous self, and of the authority of textual traditions, is beyond the scope of any one book, certain of Bloom's formulations go directly to its heart.
Because Bloom and his generation of critics have made even more overt use of religious models of interpretation than their New Critical predecessors, we can say, along with Mileur, that the crisis of humanism focuses in more narrow literary terms upon "the enormously problematical notion of secularization."
29
If the tradition of secular literary culture is threatened by post-structuralist versions of the "human sciences," then Bloom's reappropriations of ancient religious revisionism (Kabbalah, Gnosticism, etc.) can be regarded as a defensive return to origins, an
apophrades
indicating the strong possibility that no definitive break was ever made between sacred and secular textual traditions. As we have observed, Bloom makes no distinction between sacred and secular texts within the confines of his revisionary paradigm; thus he can offer a comparative reading of Freud's
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
and the tale of Jacob and the angel from Genesis, and find in both of them the same vision of "a catastrophe creation, a transference, and a family romance."
30
When a literary critic performs feats of this sort, he is playing for high stakes indeed: against contemporary modes of thought which decenter and reinsert the subject as a counter in various linguistic, political, social, or economic processes, Bloom reasserts the primacy of the individual psyche and the authority of a textual tradition based upon such primacy and capable of defending itself against historical vicissitudes through the uncanny mechanisms of persistent revisionism.
The fact that since the Enlightenment, if not earlier, the authority of sacred texts has been dispersed and only partially redistributed among a series of canons that can be defined broadly as "literary" ultimately makes little difference to Bloom; as Mileur points out, his
 
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is an essentialized and ahistorical Gnosis fueled by "his insistence on breaking down the distinction between religion and secularity, which is so constitutive of our sense of ourselves and our activities."
31
Bloom is both an ancient and a modern, or perhaps both a religious and a secular writer, since he responds to the most modern of intellectual predicaments with what many intellectuals today would perceive as the most archaic of stances. That he has put such a figure as Freud in the service of his theory in no way mitigates this circumstance: in order to further the vitality of any text, Bloom, true to his Jewish heritage, must make all things old. When an aggressive Postmodernist like Foucault declares that
criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying
32
Bloom only shakes his head, insisting that such a theorist is "massively irrelevant" to literature. Bloom's omnipresent "Scene of Instruction," while it may de-idealize authorial relations, reinstates rather than deconstructs "formal structures with universal value." Although he refuses to be associated with traditional literary humanism as well as deconstruction, since they differ only in regard to "degrees of irony, of the human gap between expectation and fulfillment,"
33
Bloom may still come to be regarded as an exaggeratedly defensive spokesman for humanistic values, who sees in literature not the "antimimesis'' of Derridean free play, but the "supermimesis" of eternal psychic struggle, ineluctably stamped upon every text.
Bloom's theoretical system obviously consists of representations of this struggle, and as one might expect, the tradition of literary humanism troubles him deeply, for he must perceive it as a vexingly idealizing precursor to his own more savage vision. Consider these uneasy observations:
If the imagination's gift comes necessarily from the perversity of the spirit, then the living labyrinth of literature is built upon the ruin of every impulse most generous in us. So apparently it is and must bewe are wrong to have founded a humanism directly upon literature itself, and the phrase "humane letters" is an oxymoron. A humanism might still be

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